So, how did this story, and not “Progeny,” spark Graves?
Madame Ariadne.
I had used her once before, in a story entitled “The Friendless Bodies of Unburied Men.” She was still a fortuneteller in that story, but her nature wasn’t nearly as compassionate; in fact, she was one scary lady. I had planned to do a series of stories featuring her, each time making major changes in her character, until the last story, which would reveal that she was not one, but several incarnations of the same spirit, each one embodying and emphasizing a different aspect of her psyche.
Again, this was a concept—like “Progeny”—that was not fully realized, and I abandoned the idea of an Ariadne series because I think readers have better things to do with their time than see how a particular storyteller is going to write his way out of a corner.
Still, the idea of a person re-inventing him/herself over and over—not just behaviorally, but physically and metaphysically, as well—appealed to me. As did the idea of where, exactly, Ariadne took these children.
At the time I wrote this story, I had only a vague notion of where these children were hidden away. I knew it was probably someplace underground, and it would be a kingdom of sorts, but that was all.
More so than any other idea I’ve had, I knew this one was going to have to simmer for a while, because when it came time to write it down, I had to get it right.
So, I took those elements—chronos, kairos, the re-invention of the self, the Hallowers, and this hidden kingdom of discarded children—and filed them away in the back of my head. I knew, somehow, that all of these elements were going to be connected, had to be connected, in fact, because I could not think of one without all of the others revealing themselves to be hidden within.
Hence, the image of the matryoshka doll. Disparate elements of the same device.
I wrote out the fictional history of the Hallowers in great detail, without consulting any of the reference literature I had collected on angels over the years. Once this was done, I found their mythology to be a bit inconsistent in places. So the question became: how do I make the Hallowers fit into the known mythology of angels?
I read through several books on the subject, the gnostic Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphal of John, Doresse’s The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, a couple of different translations of the Kabbalah, The Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans, The Zohar, countless pieces on Native American Mysticism, Jewish Mysticism, a rare, uncensored version of the King James Bible (not as easy to find as you might think, by the way), and Gustav Davidson’s invaluable Dictionary of Angels.
Through my reading, I found that—despite the radical differences in their belief/worship systems—almost all of the religions of the world which incorporate angels into their theology shared certain core beliefs about these “divine beings” that, almost without fail, fell into a “So-and-so begat so-and-so, who begat so-and-so, who begat begat begat.” (If you ever do any in-depth research into this subject, you’ll find—as I did—that, damn, the Angels are a horny bunch.)
I found these various religions also almost always made mention of a sacred, secret book/text/scroll/what-have-you which contained “forbidden” knowledge.
That text—The Book of Forbidden Knowledge—became the anchor in my mythology for the Hallowers. Incorporating elements from several different histories of angels, I ended up with a 120-page linear “family tree” of angels, all of it—I’ll say it again—all of it drawn from actual theological texts through the ages.
Once this was done, I re-read this linear history...and found it to be a dense, headache-inducing fustercluck.
And I hadn’t even begun to work in the Hallowers yet.
To lessen your suffering here, I’ll cut to the chase: I streamlined this 120-page history into a 55-page history, using The Book of Tobit as my base (a work external to the Hebrew cannon, apocryphal in Protestant Scripture, and canonical in Catholicism, the latter in which I was raised but no longer subscribe to). Once that was done, I incorporated my own Hallower history into the timeline, cut out every bit of excess that I could and still have the mythology be consistent and clear, and—bingo!—I had the central mythology of the novel. (With a few doses of thinly-disguised Greek mythology sprinkled throughout.)
Then I realized that there was no way I could just shove it down readers’ throats in one big chunk, so I broke up the narrative as much as I could, and gave it to Rael.
Ah, yes, Rael.
I mentioned earlier that writing Graves yielded two very happy surprises; Rael was one of them.
I had originally intended for him to appear only twice in the story, once at the beginning, and once at the end. But from the moment he made his second appearance (at the funeral) I realized that he wasn’t content to be a mere supporting player. I had not planned for him to show up at Denise’s funeral, but there he was, an uninvited guest, with several tricks up his sleeve. He was a smartass, a trickster, a clown, a figure of tragedy, and a loud-mouth.
God, I liked him.
I tried to get him to shut up and go away, but he refused, and the result was that Graves wound up having not two central characters (Robert and Denise), but three. Looking over the novel now, I’m quite proud of the way the relationship between Robert and Rael develops. They ended up as friends, and that was not in the original game plan, folks; but there are times—rare and precious in a writer’s life—when a character walks into your narrative and simply takes over. I won’t bore you with my own theories as to why this happens, just know that it does, and it’s often wonderful, as it was with Rael. He remains, methinks, one of the best characters I’ve ever created. In fact, there are times now when I can’t believe that I actually came up with him.
Ah, sweet mysteries of life....
Another thing that Rael did for the narrative was instill it with a hefty dose of the oral tradition of storytelling—something that I think is sadly lacking in all genres today. Jonathan Carroll is a master at this, as is Stephen King (check out the dazzling tour de force “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” and you’ll see what I mean); Peter Straub, Kate Wilhelm, Harlan Ellison, Russell Banks, Elizabeth Massie, and Caitlin Kiernan, and Anne Rice complete this too-small list of contemporary (read: still-living) writers who, with their love for the oral tradition of storytelling, create a bridge between the days when tribes would gather in the center of the village to hear a tale spun by the campfire and the modern written word, be it on an actual page or in the coding of an E-book. (Other writers I would include on that list—who sadly are no longer with us—are Kobo Abe, J.N. Williamson, Carson McCullers, Elswyth Thane, Booth Tarkington, and Robert Nathan—who remains, in my opinion, the father of Magic Realism.)
The other happy surprise was that—again, quite unexpectedly, hence the use of the word “surprise”—Graves allowed me to write a sequel to one of my short stories, “Drowning With Others.”
I have killed many of my characters, and I have left many more emotionally scarred for life or inescapably alone and lonely; just my way of spreading my personal sunshine. But when I finished “Drowning With Others,” it was the only time in my career that I felt bad over the fate of a character. (If you’d like to read “Drowning,” check out the anthologies Tombs or Imagination Fully Dilated, Volume 1; it’s even included in my book Graveyard People: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Vol. 1.)
Anyhoo...I felt terrible about the way Joseph Connor ended up. It always haunted me.
Then I realized that, in order for Robert to understand just how serious the threat of chronos was to the children of Chiaroscuro, someone had to die, and that someone had to be Ian.
I didn’t want to kill Ian, I liked him a lot, but it had to be done.
The problem was, how to make Robert aware of it.
Then I thought of the ending of “Drowning With Others,” and knew I’d found a way to save Joseph Connor from the fate I’d saddled him with so many years ago.
For the sake of continuity, I h
ad Bill Emerson (a character who— aside from his hands—is based, physically and in the way he behaves, on the immensely likable Ed Gorman) recap the major points of “Drowning” in the form of Joseph’s statement and his recorded history; this way, you wouldn’t be losing anything if you hadn’t read the story...but if you had read “Drowning,” and if you’d remembered it, then this element would be (hopefully, as it was for me) a little extra icing on the cake.
I couldn’t save Ian, but I did manage to save Joseph, and both of these elements, as it turned out, were necessary to bring Graves to its conclusion.
Rest easy, I’m nearly finished.
It might interest you to know that all medical conditions described in Denise’s files are real; rare, yes, but real nonetheless. Alan Clark provided me with a medical textbook which described and illustrated these conditions in graphic, sick-making detail.
Let’s see, a few other pieces of trivia, for those of you who might be interested:
The legend of the First Children was borrowed from Greek Mythology.
The legend of the Three Sorcerers was based on a story from the Popol Vuh.
The Hundred Years War actually lasted 116 years.
Panama hats are made in Ecuador.
Those last two have nothing to do with the novel, but seeing as how I’ve got a brain full of utterly useless information I feel compelled to inflict it on someone.
I want to thank you for buying this deluxe edition of In Silent Graves. It took me several years to find my voice as a short story writer; with Graves, I finally found my voice as a novelist. I hope it’s one you’ll want to hear again.
In Silent Graves Page 41